Adele announces 2016 UK arena tour dates

Singer will celebrate success of '25' album with rare live appearances

Adele will embark on a rare UK and Ireland tour in 2016, it has been confirmed.

Currently celebrating her record-breaking success with new album ’25’, Adele will head out on the road for a series of arena gigs in February and March next year.

Starting with two nights at Belfast’s SSE Arena on February 29 and March 1, Adele will then go on to play in Dublin, Manchester, London, Birmingham and Glasgow before heading to Europe for appearances across the continent.

Earlier today, it was confirmed that ’25’ has broken the record for the UK’s fastest selling album of all time.

Prior to the release of ’25’, the record was held by Oasis with their 1997 album ‘Be Here Now’. The Manchester band sold 696,000 copies of their album in its first week on sale. As of this morning, Adele has sold 737,000 copies of her new album.

The Official Charts Company confirmed the numbers and notes that ‘Be Here Now’ was released on a Thursday so only had three days of sales registering towards its first chart week.

Adele’s second album ’21’ sold 208,000 copies in its first week in January 2011. The final sales figures for ’25’ will be revealed on Friday before 6pm.

The album has also broken records in the US after selling over 2.433 million copies in just over three days.

The record for the fastest single-week album sales in America was previously held by boyband *NSYNC, who sold 2.416 million copies of their album ‘No Strings Attached’ in 2000.